Year Round School Statistics

How widespread is year round school? This article has information on year round school statistics for K-12 schools nationwide. The year round school statistics for the United States and beyond may surprise you.

Since about 1987 a number of public schools have decided to start using a year round school system. Do you know how many schools are using a year round school system or how many children are affected by the use of year round school? The statistics in this article may be surprising to some.

From the school year 1987-1988 to the school year 2002-2003, there was a 544 percent increase in year-round school implementations among the public schools of the United States. At the end of this period, year round school experiences schedules had been implemented in 3,181 schools in 46 states and affecting 2.3 million students. What do year round school statistics look like in the latest data? Keep reading to find out.

How Widespread is Year Round School?

To find out more about the spread of year round school, let’s look at the most recent statistics for the nation and then focus on California, which has the most year round school programs and students.

• Nationwide

In the 2006-2007 school year, only New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Wyoming had no schools-whether public, private, or charter-on year round school calendars. Of the states that had some schools with a year round school calendar, 19 states had ten or less.

Nationally among public schools, there were far more elementary schools using year round school schedules than any other level, with 2,127. There were about an equal number of middle/junior high schools and high schools with an approximately equal number of students, and 82 schools with different configurations of grades.

California led the nation with 1,322 year round public schools, with second-place falling to Hawaii with 296. Third came Arizona with 175. Nevada with 107 and Texas with 101 were fourth and fifth, and Georgia, with 97 was sixth. The order was the same for enrollment except that Georgia had more students than Texas.

Vermont had schools using year round schedules, but only private schools. Similarly, New Jersey had schools using year round school calendars, but in its case, only charter and private schools. In 2006-2007, there were 27 states with charter schools on a year round schedule, and 18 states with private schools, though there were nearly 3 times as many charter schools on such a schedule as private schools, for a total of 236 schools. The total students affected were 61,452 charter school students and 13,231 private school students.

Also in 2006-2007, there were 387 districts and 2,764 public schools nationwide that had adapted a year round school calendar, with a total enrollment of 2,024,950 public school students. This means that-with 1,118,608 students enrolled in schools using a year round school calendar, California is the residence of 55 percent of students who are in year round programs.

• California

In the 2004-2005 school year, 1,439 public schools in California alone were using year-round education. This is a little more than 15% of all the public schools in the state. The greatest number of schools using year round school calendars were elementary schools, which made up more than 79% of the total. There were also 144 middle schools, 79 high schools, and 14 K-12 schools.

There were nearly 1,250,000 students on year round school schedules in 2004-2005, with roughly two-thirds in multi-track schools. In fact, the schedules were close to evenly split between single-track schools (48%) and multi-track schools (52%).

The most used type of year round school calendar of the “standard” types was 60/20 (see the article “Year Round School Overview” for an explanation of the calendars)-used by 450 schools. Other calendars in use included 45/15, 90/30, and-for a few schools-60/15. Notably, 540 schools used custom calendars that do not match any of these calendars.

Beyond the United States

The United States is not the only site for experimentation with year round school schedules. In 2006-2007, 84 Canadian public and private schools in 3 provinces had a total of 27,022 students on year round school calendars. In the Pacific, Guam, Saipan, and Pohnpei had 27 public and private schools between them on year round school calendars, with 16,016 students.